Anti-Personal landmines are a significant barrier to economic and social development in a number of countries. Several sensors have been developed but each one will probably have to find, if it exists, a specific area of applicability, determined by technological as well as economical or even social factors, and possibly other sensors to work with using some form of sensor fusion. A significant issue concerns the safety of the deminer. For every 5000 mines removed, one deminer is killed. The design of an accurate sensor may reduce the amount of time needed to determine whether a landmine exists, but does not increase the safety of the deminer. Since the safety issues during the eradication process are of great concern, the use and integration of cheap and simple robots and sensors in humanitarian demining has been raised. This removes the deminer from close contact with mines. This paper is concerned mainly with the work that has been done in the area of robotics and landmine detection, the problems involved, the issues that have been overlooked and the future of robots in the field.

The human motor-control system has a hierarchical and decentralized structure, and building such a control system for a multiple robot system would require a decomposed model. The difficulty in decomposing complex robotic systems is due to interactions between robots, and the paper proposes a control architecture that controls the manipulator joints and interactions separately. A decomposable model for an N - n degrees-of-freedom multimanipulator/object system handling an object is derived. This model is then used to design a Lyapunov-based fuzzy logic controller for the system by solving linear matrix equalities. It is shown that this controller is closed-loop stable and a stable suboptimal controller for the system may be designed using bounds.

When designing a Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy controller, reducing the number of rules makes it easier to derive a stable Lyapunov based controller using linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). The paper describes an intuitive way of reducing a fuzzy ruleset by eliminating rules that are very similar in terms of parameters and membership functions. It is then suggested that a more formal approach to this intuitive idea may be found in rough set theory.

This paper describes the aspects involved in modelling a multi-robotic system from a human motor control perspective. Building a control system for a multi-robot system that works in a similar fashion to the human motor control system would require a decomposable model. Decomposition of a complex robotic system is difficult due to the interactions between the subsystems. The proposed method of separating the interconnections is applied with the aid of fuzzy modelling to derive a fully decomposable model of two manipulator robots handling a common object.